La Russa next on the hot seat after Maddon’s firing
NEW YORK — Tough times last week for two of baseball’s most enduring managers. At 68 years old and 56 games into the final year on his contract, Joe Maddon was fired as manager of the Angels in the midst of a 12-game losing streak. A couple days later 77-year-old Tony La Russa came under renewed fire from ever-critical White Sox fans and media for ordering an intentional walk to the Dodgers’ Trea Turner with a 1-2 count.
It didn’t matter that La Russa had a very logical explanation for the seemingly unorthodox move that backfired spectacularly when the next batter, Max Muncy, hit a threerun homer. This was red meat for the legions of La Russa critics clamoring for him to go the same way as Maddon in the wake of the White Sox’s disappointing season so far.
As La Russa explained it, once a wild pitch by lefty White Sox reliever Bennett Sousa allowed the Dodgers’ Freddie Freeman to advance to second base with two outs in the sixth inning last Thursday, “it wasn’t a tough call” to go ahead and walk the right-handed-hitting Turner — a .333 hitter with two strikes against a lefthanded pitcher this year — in favor of the struggling lefty-hitting Muncy, who was hitting .150.
It’s been a trying year for La Russa. Once again the White Sox, 27-29, have been beset with injuries. One of their best hitters, Eloy Jimenez, and last year’s No. 1 starter Lance Lynn have both been out all year, and Tim Anderson has been down for a couple of weeks now to name three big ones. Plus Yoan Moncada, expected to be a big cog in the lineup, has been both hurt and awful (.141).
With so many holes, La Russa has been roundly criticized for giving excessive playing time to .184-hitting utilityman Leury Garcia, especially when batting him leadoff or third in the lineup. But barring the kind of long losing streak that did in Maddon, La Russa’s job is secure. It just might not be very pleasant dealing with the long knives, who think he’s lost it, on a day-to-day basis.
As for Maddon, who may have just been the luckiest manager on the face of the Earth, the gravy train is probably over after 1,382 wins (31st all-time) with three different teams and one world championship with the Cubs in 2016 — which many have agreed was one of the worst managed World Series ever. Mind you, I like Joe Maddon as a person. But as a manager he was vastly overrated; his secret to success being in the right place at the right time.
He got his first break with the Rays in the cradle of analytics in 2006 when Lou Piniella got tired of all the losing that came with the lowest payroll in baseball.
Maddon had to endure two more years of losing before all those top prospects — David Price, Carl Crawford, Evan Longoria, B.J. Upton, James Shields, et al., — Piniella couldn’t wait for all blossomed into stars and went to the World Series in 2008.
When the Rays slipped under .500 for the first time in six years in 2014 and it appeared all the constant turnover from shedding their best players before they reached free agency had finally caught up to them, Maddon was able to use a loophole in his contract and jumped to the Cubs.
And like with the Rays, Maddon inherited a Cubs team that had just gone through five years of tanking under GM Theo Epstein and had a core of young players — Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo, Jorge Soler, Javy Baez, Kyle Hendricks, et al., — who, augmented by Epstein’s signing of staff ace Jon Lester, were ready to win. Maddon won the ‘16 World Series with that group.